A Wall of Two: Poems of Resistance and Suffering from Kraków to Buchenwald and Beyond

by Henia Karmel, Ilona Karmel, Arie A. Galles (Translator)

Buchenwald survivors Ilona and Henia Karmel were seventeen and twenty years old when they entered the Nazi labor camps from the Kraków ghetto. These remarkable poems were written during that time. The sisters wrote the poems on worksheets stolen from the factories where they worked by day and hid them in their clothing. During what she thought were the last days of her life, Henia entrusted the poems to a cousin who happened to pass her in the forced march at the end of the war. The cousin gave them to Henia's husband in Kraków, who would not locate and reunite with his wife for another six months.

This is the first English publication of these extraordinary poems. Fanny Howe's deft adaptations preserve their freshness and innocence while making them entirely compelling. They are presented with a biographical introduction that conveys the powerful story of the sisters' survival from capture to freedom in 1946.

Genres: Poetry, World War II

158 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2007

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is difficult today from the perspective of two years to contemplate the genesis of these poems.
We look at them in astonishment, powerless before their strangeness. It's as if we were meeting old friends after years of separation. They are known but foreign because of an impossible chasm - time and distance. Words spat out in a fever, screamed poems, no sound like weak whispers, almost inaudible. Experience that we tried to reproduce in all their horrible reality have slipped into pallid outlines, already almost erased.
When we look at them right in front of us, the images come again: inscriptions upon the walls of prisons and camps, scrawled at the last moment by people who had already died. Cries for help, calls for revenge, a sentence terminated at midpoint, maybe only a name and a date, the terror of those days marked clumsily by a weakening hand upon a hard indifferent wall. Today only half-readable traces remain.
These poems are exactly that: inscriptions on a prison wall. They are feeble efforts to preserve a record. Why make such an effort to leave behind a trace and to transmit one's experience before it is all over? What forced us to do this? Was it the pain or was it a protest against the absolute end of things?
No. Having been taught by machine guns to think in categories of thousands and millions, we had reconciled ourselves to the unimportance of the individual. Did we write in order to transmit information and thereby incite people to later vengeance? No. In those days we understood the complete futility to match any punishment to this crime.
And yet we did write for people in the future as an act of self-defense. We wanted others to discover in our suffering a meaning and a purpose: to ensure that millions did not die in vain as long as our experience was used as a warning for future generations.
These poems, and thousands of other creations, form one cry only: "Remember."

- Preface: To an Unknown Reader, pg. xv-xvi

One, two, three, four...

Numbered and nameless

And clothed in standard-issue rags

Here they come - to prison

To be introduced

To trembling lamps,

Drizzle, rifles and hard rain,

To sufferings without number.

- Us, pg. 9

* * *

Excuse me, sir, just a minute.
Could you kindly tell me
where I can find a human being?
That's right. A normal one
in a suit or something. Maybe
double- or single-breasted.
Black or navy, no brass buttons,
no uniforms. A person.
Are they out of stock?
Is this mania for uniforms all we get?
Is this today's fashion?
What a shame!
I thought maybe there would be one specimen left,
perhaps in the zoo in Berlin.

- German Uniform Mania, pg. 12

* * *

1
Curtain fell

Comedy over

Orchestra stopped

on the upbeat

Actor vanished
before the audience
even met him

The first act the last.

2
Hey take a look at this crematorium
It's brand new
You push a button
Electricity zooms through
the line and then the wheel turns
at a dizzying speed
Then it just stops. A shout
And it's done.

3
Hello! I'm a slut.
Don't believe it?
Honest to goodness.
My father was decent
but his daughter's a whore,
or if your prefer, a courtesan
properly raised
(though not pedigreed,
professionally speaking)
until I had to sell myself.
My name is Number 906.
And guess what? I still write verse.

4
And do you want to know
what i do for a living?
I'm not joking.
I sort shell casings
It's the best job
because killing is good
and time passes fast
when the work has a purpose.

5
What was that?
A tomato tossed
to us discreetly
with a laugh?

No, not at all.
It is a bloody scrap
of someone's heart
ripped apart

by pity.

- Snapshots, pg. 27-29

* * *

An abscess pulses.
Pus collects inside it.
Agony pumps in
the mouth. Repulsive.

My dreams are aching.
They pulse and hammer
and have an appetite.
Do you feel that knife?

It cuts to the bone.
It's a pen. Ready
for surgery. Slice!
Do what you can, words.

Burst the sorrow out.
Ah yes. Like that.

- The Abscess, pg. 46

* * *

When I stand before you on that long-awaited day,
you won't even know me.

"Truly you don't know me?"

You will stop and stare.

I will look at you through my tears until I hear you ask:
"My God, is that you?"

"Have I changed so much?"

"No, not really. It's just that I kept you alive in my dreams
and you had different eyes then. Transparent green like the sea.
Now they gaze on me so sadly, and are troubled by grief.
Before you had a lovely red mouth, childlike, joyful,
but it's all changed."

"Well then, look forever in wonder
at the sad and troubled eyes of your wife, now another."

- Encounter, pg. 54

* * *

Although I waited for you every day
you didn't return.
No charming smile crossed the screen of memories.
Time, that comforter, had pulled you under its dark arm
and led you away into shadows
and the past. No I don't know for sure
if any of it happened in my life
or if my heart, out of kindness,
dreamed up such happiness.

- Waiting, pg. 64

[Bryce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Between the Fanny Howe and the fact that I have long sought out poetry written while in situations of historically horrible tragedy (see also Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad, Edited by Polina Barskova), but I was really blown away by this book, and it's amazing to me that it has not developed more of a following.

This is a unique document in that it consists of poetry written by two young sisters while interned at Buchenwald, and also in its translation, which was translated first literally, and then "adapted" by poet Fanny Howe, who was a close friend of Ilona Karmel. The foreword tells the harrowing story of the Karmel sisters' internment and survival, and Henia's reuniting with her husband. At the end there is a letter written by Henia to a publisher which stands as a sort of author's note for these poems of witness. And finally, a detailed translator's note which describes, so we won't think there's been any funny business, exactly Fanny Howe went about "adapting" these poems.

The poems focus on life in the camps and the longing, specifically, of Henia for her husband, Leon Wolfe, whom she assumed she would never see again.

I don't really know how to write a review of poetry; my standard is whether it was beautiful and whether I loved it and whether it made me feel more like there is a reason to live, and this book gave me all of those things.